I do a lot of blog work, both for myself and clients. As such, I’ve ended up trying out pretty much every tool, software, and script related to blogging. The majority I throw away, while others have proved themselves invaluable to saving me time, making me more money, or just making blogging much easier. (Plugins mentioned are for the Wordpress blogging platform only)

Free Adult Blogger Tools

1. Windows Live Writer - I have tried a lot of remote blogging tools, because the last thing I really want to do is log into a bunch of Wordpress and Blogger blogs to do updates. I have tossed aside all but one - Microsoft’s Live Writer. This nifty piece of stand alone software is in its third part of beta testing and has a ton of great features to make posting to my blogs easy. It supports remote posting to most major blog platforms, easy tagging, timestamp editing, image handling, image uploads, pinging, and pretty much everything else you could ever want in a remote blog posting software. To clear up any confusion, I use this on my handwritten blogs - it does not do anything with RSS.

2. Custom Wordpress Install Zip - You can save yourself a little bit of time on every Wordpress install by putting together your own custom zip of plugins and themes you commonly use. This works well if you have a ton of plugins that you don’t want to upload after the fact, and it’s especially useful if you aren’t on a host with one click installs.

3. Thumblogger - is a free hosted blog service with a rather interesting blogging script that I like a great deal. Plus, it’s the brain child of Twan, who is an absolutely amazing, brilliant person with lots of free tools that are quite helpful (as you’ll see reading down this list).

4. Blog Submitter - I don’t tend to link outside of my network on my blogs, but Twan’s directories are the one place I’ll always submit to. Part of it is because they are all nice PR, but the other part is because he made a submitter that makes it quite easy to get listed.

5. Jace’s List of RSS Feeds - Jace is the man to go to for all things RSS - and this is his list of great RSS feeds from sponsors. Go sign up under him and get some great feeds for blog content!

6. Related Posts Plugin - This neat plugin shows a list of related posts under each post (or wherever you put the php call). This might not sound like much, but Related Posts does a few helpful things at once for your blog. First, bounce rate is decreased on individual posts pages because the visitor sees related posts that will keep them reading on the blog. Second, this promotes better internal linking and traffic flow within your site. Pretty damn nifty, eh?

7. Google Sitemaps Generator Plugin - This plugin creates a google compatible sitemap, as well as pinging the webmaster tools service so that you can provide an easier crawling experience for Googlebot.

8. Gallery 2 Blog - This is another great service by Twan that allows you to create and feed your own RSS feeds. It’s simple to use - all you do is import a list of FHGs. The script will generate thumbnails (that look pretty nice, I have to say) and will allow you to set up a specific template for the blog posts. Then you can just go through, add some sentences to the default descriptions, and send the feed off to populate your blogs. It can automatically feed Thumblogger blogs, but the feeds are compatible with most RSS parsing software.

9. Social Poster - This is not a social bookmarking auto poster, but what it does do is help you submit a lot easier to the various adult social bookmarking sites out there. While I prefer to keep my own list of social sites, this can be helpful if you’re just starting out.

10. All in One SEO Plugin - I used to use 5 separate plugins for making Wordpress SEO friendly out of the box. Now, I use one - this plugin is great and you don’t really have to do much more than activate it.

11. Ping O Matic - There are lots of different pinging software out there - but I’ve always just used Ping O Matic to hit the standard list up. I tried refining a ping list a long time back, but except for one or two places it was mostly useless.

There are probably some that I am missing, but it’s rather late at night so my brain isn’t working completely. :)

Paid Tools for Adult Bloggers

While there are a plethora of free tools out there, some of the most useful ones are these paid tools. As a disclaimer, yes there are ref codes (why not put them in?) but feel free to strip them out if you really want to - all of the following are products I heavily endorse and want to support one way or another.

1. Hosthead - I love them. I love them for the amazing dedicated server they have me on, I love them for the near instant, quality support they have been giving me for almost a year now, and I love the fact that I’ve had no downtime other than that which I have caused myself. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to test loading and download speeds off a few of my sites - I’m more than happy to show anyone how great Hosthead is.

2. kaktusan’s Scripts - This guy has made a ton of very neat, time saving scripts that will help you out in your blogging travels. You can find full information on his site, as going over each of these would take up a bit too much space here - but needless to say, I use and love them:
Blogs Automator
Blogs Organizer
Links Organizer
Rocket Pinger
Gallery Scraper
Feeds Observer
Site Organizer
Tradezilla

3. SEO Book - Now, I’m not usually one for buying ‘guru’ books or anything like that. But the SEO Book (and site) is chock full of great information on all things SEO. That and I like books that get updated all the time.

Hopefully this article helps you out in your search for great blogging tools. I’ll update it once I’ve figured out what I’ve forgotten exactly.